Re: Today's programmer is not such innovative as past's

Re: Today's programmer is not such innovative as past's

Posted 17 September 2012 - 12:47 PM

jon.kiparsky, on 17 September 2012 - 06:51 PM, said:

Regardless of the virtues of creating work for programmers down the road, the use of 2-digit dates was a very good design in an era of limited memory. This begins with punch cards, of course: you have 80 columns, it's 1950 - do you really think you want to use two columns for the year? As the records migrate to electronic storage, memory is still very expensive, and shaving two digits from that field still makes sense. The failure occurred later, when programmers failed to adapt the design to expanding memory capacities.

They should have used Julian Date encoding in the first place, then it would have delayed the issue to 2078. (Assuming epoch date of 1/Jan/1960) (7bit year, 9bits day in year).

Re: Today's programmer is not such innovative as past's

They also did some really stupid things, like using two characters for the year instead of four. That cost businesses and individuals billions of dollars and millions of lost man hours to fix.

You think a COBOL programmer writing code in the 1960s(!) was thinking about someone still running the same code long after they've retired? First known reference to Y2K is in 1984, in Computerworld. Even then, it sounded too far away to worry about. Who would keep one of these ancient systems running into the next century?

I have programs 10+ years old running live, in production, that were supposed to be a bandaid for the new systems that never came.

Remember, it's possible your code will run longer that you do.

In the 1960s? No. From the late 70s on, yes. Tempus fugit, and twenty something years isn't very long.

I remember asking about the date issue in 1980 (Fortran: my first programming class) and being told that if anyone was still running this junk in twenty years it was their own fault. Since they were admitting that their code was junk I gave up the argument. By the way, the first Mac OS (and subsequent versions too) never had a Y2K issue. Somebody was thinking ahead in the early 1980s.

Re: Today's programmer is not such innovative as past's

In the 1960s? No. From the late 70s on, yes. Tempus fugit, and twenty something years isn't very long.

60s.

From your Wikipedia:

Quote

The first compilers for COBOL were subsequently implemented in 1960, and on December 6 and 7, essentially the same COBOL program ran on two different computer makes, an RCA computer and a Remington-Rand Univac computer, demonstrating that compatibility could be achieved.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL

Re: Today's programmer is not such innovative as past's

Posted 17 September 2012 - 06:38 PM

Like I said, I don't blame a programmer in the 60s, but I think for the OP the old days don't start until at least 1973 with the first release of C, and probably not until much later when it became a dominant language. That would put things easily into the 1980s, when people were talking about Y2K even if most of them were still ignoring it. And let's not forget that many (not all) C programmers were using two digit dates back then too, even though memory was much cheaper than in the 1960s.

I think I'm getting a bit off topic though. My main point is that programmers are people, and so they're just as flawed as everyone else. As with most other jobs, at any point in time you have a minority that are truly innovative and/or highly skilled and then you have a bunch that range from good to mediocre. The rest are truly awful and should be doing something else. If all you see are the terrible examples your opinion will be skewed in that direction, so my advice is to read sites like this one but pay the most attention to the thoughtful answers and try to ignore the lazy questions.

Re: Today's programmer is not such innovative as past's

Posted 18 September 2012 - 06:53 AM

With the passage of time came more sophistication in technologies used in each era. The innovations of the succeeding generations will always be built on the "innovations" of their predecessors; this cycle continues on and on, and on... until the end of time.

Programmers of this era are very innovative too with what we have and where we find ourselves. We don't have to go back in time and re-invent the wheels to prove that. After all, the innovations of our predecessors was meant to be for our benefit so that we can go on and be innovative on our own based on their own innovations!

Re: Today's programmer is not such innovative as past's

Posted 18 September 2012 - 06:59 AM

Ace26, on 18 September 2012 - 08:53 AM, said:

After all, the innovations of our predecessors was meant to be for our benefit

Um, no. The innovations of our predecessors were for their own benefit. They wanted to make neat stuff, so they did. They wanted also to process payroll data and model airflow over wings and stuff like that, so they did. We happen to be able to build on some of their work, which is handy, but it's just a side effect.

Re: Today's programmer is not such innovative as past's

Posted 07 October 2012 - 02:48 PM

Dennis Ritchie also helped create Unix, and the Unix philosophy is to "write programs that do one thing and do it well," and to make software work together.

But I actually agree that programmers of the past were way more innovative. It's not because there were more great programmers coming up with unique ideas back then, it's just that back in the day you probably didn't have a computer unless you were really passionate about computing and you knew what you were doing. Also, the advances in hardware and software are hardly related; our brains aren't getting smarter as processors get smaller.